Ron Paul Blimp: “Two of the three airship companies we contacted had 3-12 month minimum contracts at a range of $225-$350K a month for various different features and blimps. Many airships only seat 3-9 people plus the pilots.”

Now here’s some absolute strangeness. Kucinich’s bill to impeach Cheney still has a chance. There was an effort to table the bill, but the bill survived the tabling vote and is now headed again to the Judiciary Committee. Could it be that some Democratic Congress members are growing balls? Or is it more Republican shaming, as Paul Kane suggests? You know, November and the threat of re-election does funny things to politicians. Too bad Pelosi and Hoyer are more interesting in taking all the fun out of politics by sticking with their non-impeachment agenda. Which is a bit like a bunch of six-year-olds insisting on keeping the tea party going in the playground while the school bullies keep beating the tar out of all the good kids.

Washington Post: “That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Sponsored by Ron Paul: HR 300: “Prohibits the Supreme Court and each federal court from adjudicating any claim or relying on judicial decisions involving: (1) state or local laws, regulations, or policies concerning the free exercise or establishment of religion; (2) the right of privacy, including issues of sexual practices, orientation, or reproduction; or (3) the right to marry without regard to sex or sexual orientation where based upon equal protection of the laws.”

If you think I’m being a bit paranoid about how these three points — curtailing the natural trajectory of the judicial branch and its ability to corral past judicial decisions with present ones — will be liberally perceived by the Republicans, why not hear Ron Paul explain the bill in his own words? “I am also the prime sponsor of HR 300, which would negate the effect of Roe v Wade by removing the ability of federal courts to interfere with state legislation to protect life. This is a practical, direct approach to ending federal court tyranny which threatens our constitutional republic and has caused the deaths of 45 million of the unborn.”

The man even had the temerity to call his bill the “We the People Act.”

Stripping the courts of their right to overturn previous decisions or rule on lower court or state decisions with such an overbroad definition is contrary to what the United States of America is about. I am appalled. No true patriot would consider this court right to be a “tyranny.”

BBC: “Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani has been criticised over a fundraising party at which participants are being urged to donate $9.11. The International Association of Fire Fighters accuses him of exploiting the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.”

AP: “The Senate voted 72-25 to pass a resolution condemning a MoveOn.org ad that referred to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, as ‘Gen. Betray Us.’ The liberal group’s full-page ad appeared last week in The New York Times.”

Fuck you, Washington. Fuck you very much.

“The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” — Article One, Section 9, U.S. Constitution

So here’s the question. Who’s invading and who’s rebelling? I’d really like an answer as to how we are now enforcing public safety.

Cindy Sheehan on Daily Kos: “I can’t post here anymore because my potential run for Congress is not on the Democratic ticket.”

How dare Sheehan protest the failures of Democrats! How dare she call upon the Democrats to impeach Bush! Why, that doesn’t fall into the hard line of helping to elect Democrats!

It is this kind of willful censorship — of a blog unwilling to understand that there are people, left and right, who aren’t exactly happy with what the Democrats are doing — that is a huge part of the problem. The more that the Daily Kos turns its head away from those who are vocal about Democratic inadequacies, the more it resembles a self-serving tool rather than a forum for ideas. And how different is this mentality from a right-wing blog?

This hypocrisy is why I find the Daily Kos so unreadable.

The big blogs, in many ways, have become as mainstream as their print and television counterparts. And while I’m not completely opposed to mainstream media — in part because I have the perhaps foolish belief that some things can be changed within it — I worry whether bloggers sometimes advocate the status quo more than they should. A good blogger — never mind whether political or literary — should regularly question her own beliefs and be flexible to the idea that she is sometimes wrong about the people or the issues that she takes to task. It is this quality that promotes good thinking. It is this quality that permits a wider spectrum for debate among bloggers and readers.

Stamford Advocate: “Orman seized control of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party this week after registering as its sole member and electing himself as chairman. Orman has triggered a process that will force Lieberman and state elections officials to decide the future of a party created solely to return the senator to Washington.”

I do not care what your political persuasion is. But I’ll just say this.

If you do not vote tomorrow, you are not entitled to complain. You are not entitled to bitch. You are not entitled to raise a stink about anything that goes down during the next few years. If you cannot get your lazy ass off the sofa and get down to a polling place, then anything even remotely political coming out of your maw means nothing. Because in throwing your vote away, in choosing not to participate, you have capitulated one of the great rights bestowed upon you by our Founding Fathers.

Perhaps you’re hesitant because you can’t be troubled to actually look at all that helpful information that came in the mail. I mean, hell, hundreds of pages of legalese ain’t exactly riveting reading. Or maybe it’s because you can’t be troubled to concern yourself with the crazed situation unfolding around us, or because you’re annoyed by all the automated phone calls, or because you are perhaps guided by fear or laziness or the sense that your voice does not matter or that this election will be stolen. Well, your voice does matter! And don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

But if you decide not to use that voice, even if it means wincing when pulling the lever for a flaacid Democrat or voting in a shady Republican incumbent you’re not particularly crazy about (full confession: I’m going to be doing a lot of wincing tomorrow morning myself), if you cannot be troubled to make a hard and careful decision about the future of this nation, then how, I ask, can you live with yourself? You’re capable of deciding among any number of uneasy dichotomies: Coke or Pepsi? Lennon or McCartney? Beatles or Stones? Mozart or Beethoven? Mac or PC? Star Trek or Star Wars? All of these are troublesome and sometimes quite nauseous choices to make, representing a veritable yin-yang of pros and cons no matter which way you decide. But you have no problems accepting the responsibility of being culturally decisive in this field.

Do you mean to tell me that, when you see an unsavory duo like the Republicans and Democrats, you cannot make a similar choice? That you cannot make a decision? Even a reluctant one?

Sure, the electoral college system sucks. And you’re not alone in despising it or thinking that it’s useless. No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson wrote:

….I have no hesitation in saying that I have ever considered the constitutional mode of election ultimately by the legislature voting by states as the most dangerous blot in our constn*, and one which some unlucky chance will some day hit, and give us a pope & anti-pope.

Jefferson’s words to George Hay were amazingly prophetic. For what do we have but the pope and anti-pope? Red states and blue states? A political system that suggests you are for something or against something, when any Joe with even a dollop of common sense knows that life ain’t that black and white.

But this is nevertheless our system. And, flawed as it is, if you do not make your voice known tomorrow, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

It is profoundly important that you vote tomorrow. Vote not because some smug suit or scruffy hippie tells you that you should vote a particular way, but because now, more than ever, this republic needs your input.

* — Short for “Constitution.”

Olbermann& Co. on Limbaugh.

Fuck you, Morgan Spurlock. If you genuinely believe that a war fought on flimsy pretext, the erosion of our civil liberties, the wholesale inability of the assclown posse at 1600 Penn to understand the ramifications of our actions (much less listening to anyone with an opposing viewpoint), the oil crisis, the water crisis, the energy crisis, our insouciant approach to torture, the rampant criminalization of brown-skinned people without due process, wiretapping, the authoritarian impulses of the Department of Justice and their flyboy accomplices, and, most recently, Congress granting the President more freedom to declare martial law are actions that we can be civil about, as if they amount to some idyllic summer picnic rather than genuine affronts to human decency, then I really can’t fathom how the fuck you function. If Kerry’s defeat in 2004 proved anything, it was this: Who’s going to listen to some spineless fucktard (and, in Spurlock’s case, a two-bit filmmaker who struck it rich with a stunt more suited to a reality TV show than a documentary proper) describing something as grotesque as the deaths of our soldiers, the deaths of innocent civilians, and the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay with a flatline timbre? What kind of human being do you have to be not to be angry about all this? What kind of orifice do you have to lodge your head into not to be pissed off? I realize that my anger is partisan, but I’d really like to know.

Who’s really going to believe some callow “liberal” with a stick up his smug anus talking about the realities that are unfolding around us?

It disheartens me in the extreme that so much of America would rather ignore the wholesale erosion of civil liberties and the deaths and the ancillary clusterfucks that ensure our role as the Alfred E. Neuman of the world, keeping their heads in the sand rather than trying to understand this once promising and now detestable working theory known as the American Empire. The United States of America is at the lowest point I’ve observed in my thirty-two years, and I don’t want it to be this way.

On the flip side, if I receive another fucking MoveOn email, I’m going to destroy something. How the fuck does some MoveOn party make a fucking difference? So I meet with my fellow liberals and we exchange delusions of grandeur. Wow! Such remarkable time management! Let’s not kid ourselves. We are at a point where only rigorous person-to-person contact, particularly with our apparent opponents, is going to work. We are at a point where we must get our asses into these so-called red states and find out why these folks think the way they do and what their concerns are and how we might work together. But I cannot see this happening.

Is there nobody out there who can speak with conviction, honesty, a rationale discernible to the layman, a daring quality to fight dirty when necessary, spitting in the face of authoritarian blackguards, and to convey some undeniable sense that we so-called liberals know what the hell we’re doing? In a country of 300 million people, I think not. Probability dictates otherwise.

Civility? Oh, I think any liberal knows deep down in her heart that we’re well beyond that point. These bastards want to fight dirty. And if we don’t fight dirty, if we don’t fight back as if our lives depended on it, then the midterm elections will be lost. And we will deserve the madness and the tyranny, even more augmented than the present scenario, that will come not long thereafter.

…here’s something seedier.